UCare Associate Vice President of Equity and Inclusion Joy Marsh subscribes to the idea that equity is everyone's job.
"For healthcare companies in particular, so much of our bottom line is tied to how it is we're reducing the cost of healthcare delivery while also providing really high quality healthcare to all the members that we serve," Ms. Marsh said in an interview with Becker's. "When you're talking about social risk factors and structural racism and the ties to those health outcomes, they're enormous. For healthcare companies, it's really important to be a part of that work in a deeply meaningful way. Because it's not just a financial need for us, it's also a moral obligation to be a part of that work."
Ms. Marsh joined the Minneapolis community-based nonprofit health plan in August 2021. She's the first to serve in this role for the company. She came to the company after serving six years as the city of Minneapolis' director of the division of race and equity.
"I came into my city role, like this role at UCare, as a first," she said. "First in a role to really build some of that internal scaffolding around how we're advancing equity. Building a team, charting a vision. The roles were very similar in that regard.
"However, I'll say one of the distinctions at UCare is organizational readiness to really truly be bold and consistent in executing that vision. Because my entry into Minneapolis was very different, and I didn't have a lot of those supports, one of the lessons I learned from that process is how to take note of who is ready to move in an organization and to pay attention to really where people are and finding ways to meet them in that specific space.
"Having built a team in an environment that was very different, it also helped me gain a lot of knowledge about what it takes to think strategically about the work and not get caught up in tactical and sometimes very siloed responses to equity, but what it truly, truly means to implement processes that contribute to wall-to-wall transformation."
With less than a year at UCare, Ms. Marsh said there are no typical days.
"In many ways I think about our work as a startup," she said. "There's the work of understanding where UCare is around how we as an organization have thought about DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], how we've begun to come to some understanding to what anti-racism means, and also finding ways to embed some of the best practices and bring my leadership to the work, hopefully in a way that elevates what's already here that's really great, what's here that's emerging that we can build toward, and how to actually in many ways meet the organization where that is.
"From a practical perspective what that looks like is building really deep relationships with my colleagues across the organization. Trying to understand what the business is doing, where there are opportunities to be a bit more deeply engaged, because some people are a little bit further down their trajectory. But also using the data that I'm learning to figure what's the sort of infrastructure we need to be building, what kind of staffing do we need in the department, what type of capacity building do we need, what sort of processes need to be put in place to make sure that we're embedding equity and anti-racism in all of our decisions."
Ms. Marsh said there's been support throughout all levels of the organization.
"There's a tremendous amount of work that we need to do, and I appreciate being at an organization that recognizes that for certain, but is also consistently conveying in word and deed a commitment to do that really hard work," she said.